Section I -- The Software

The United States government is building a software system called CAPE.

CAPE stands for Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries. It has four components: a Claim Portal, a Mass Processing module, a Review and Liquidation engine, and a Refund mechanism. As of March 19, 2026, these components are between 45 and 80 percent complete. The system is being built by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to process refunds for more than 330,000 importers who paid tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled the government was never authorised to collect.

The refund obligation is approximately $166 billion.

To request their money back, importers must upload a Comma-Separated Values file -- a CSV -- listing the entry summaries for which they are seeking refunds. The file is then checked against Harmonized Tariff Schedule numbers across approximately 11,000 product categories. The system recalculates what duties would have been owed if the unlawful tariffs had never been imposed. Then it processes the refund.

CAPE has a project timeline, a four-part architecture, tracked completion percentages, and a clearly defined workflow. The Bureau notes this because the tariff policy that created the need for CAPE -- the one that generated $166 billion in collections now classified as unlawful -- changed more than fifty times in twelve months and at no point possessed a comparable level of organisational structure.

The cleanup operation is better engineered than the operation it is cleaning up.